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Oddny Eir at PEN World Voices' 'Resonances: Writers on the Classics'

  • Baruch College, Engelman Recital Hall 55 Lexington Avenue, B2 New York, NY 10010 (map)

On Thursday May 4, Oddny Eir, author of Land of Love and Ruins, will appear at PEN World Voices Festival's "Resonances: Writers on the Classics" event at Baruch College. International award-winning writers read passages from works that influenced them alongside passages from their own writing, with Teju Cole, Marilyn Nelson, and Samanta Schweblin. Moderated by Bridgett Davis.

Since 2008, the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature has teamed up each year with Baruch's Great Works and Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence program to invite distinguished contemporary writers from across the globe to choose a classic work, speak about its influence on them, and read a passage from the classic or from their own writing.

The PEN World Voices Festival, which for the past two years has highlighted geographic regions like Africa and Mexico, will shift its focus this year to gender and power in the age of President Trump. This year’s festival, which runs from May 1-7 in New York, will feature 150 writers in a series of talks, readings and workshops related to social justice, sexuality and politics.

Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream, the first of her novels to appear in English, was published in January in a translation by Megan McDowell. Chosen as one of the 22 best young Spanish-language novelists by Granta, Schweblin is the author of three award-winning short story collections that have been translated into 20 languages.

Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer and art historian whose second novel, Open City, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was named by Time as one of the best books of 2011. His work appears regularly in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and other publications.

Poet Marilyn Nelson is the spring 2017 Sidney Harman Writer-in- Residence at Baruch College. She has written eight poetry collections, most recently My Seneca Village (2015). She has also published numerous collections of verse for children and adults. From 2001-2006 she was Poet Laureate of Connecticut, and in 2017 she was awarded the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature.

Oddný Eir is an art lecturer, gallerist and environmental activist who has collaborated with the musical artist Björk. Her novel Land of Love and Ruins, translated by Philip Roughton, won the EU Prize for Literature.

Novelist and filmmaker Bridgett Davis is the director of Baruch's Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence program. Her most recent novel Into the Go- Slow was selected as a Best Book of 2014 by Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, Book Riot, Bustle, and The Root, among others. Her memoir What Does Happiness Play For? is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2018.

When: Thursday, May 4 at 6:00 pm

Where: Baruch College, Engelman Recital Hall, 55 Lexington Avenue, B2, New York, NY 10010 (enter on 25th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues)